There is a tiny species of carpenter bees known as the spurred ceratina (Ceratina calcarata) that behaves unlike any other known species of bee. With their elongated and shiny bluish-black bodies, the spurred ceratina is perhaps best known as a pollinator of delicious gourds like cucumbers and watermelons. At around 6.5 millimeters long, it’s about half the length of an aspirin....
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Humans have caused so many changes to our planet that some experts say we’re on par with mass extinctions of eons past. We are equivalent to the asteroid that crushed most of the dinosaurs or the Great Dying that wiped out nearly all life on Earth. Some have proposed calling our current geological age the “Anthropocene,” derived from the Greek word “anthropo” for “human.”...
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On Tuesday, while testifying under oath in front of Mexico’s Congress, journalist and ufologist José Jaime Maussan Flota shocked the world with two boxes that he claimed contained the bodies of deceased extraterrestrial visitors. Not surprisingly, social media has been abuzz about these reports. Yet are they valid?
“They are beings, non-humans who are not part of our terrestrial evolution.”
While the term “high cholesterol” is usually associated with health problems, there is at least one way in which most people would prefer to have high cholesterol: In their inner ear, so that they will continue to have strong hearing as they get older. At least, that is the premise a recent study in the scientific journal PLOS Biology, whose authors found that plant-based substances called phytosterols — which look and act like cholesterol — improved the hearing in mice who had grown deaf while losing their inner ear cholesterol....
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Although the exoplanet TOI-1853 b is roughly the size of Neptune, its mass is almost twice that of any other known planet of comparable size. For this reason, TOI-1853 b should not exist, at least based on the known laws of physics. That is why some scientists have a bold hypothesis — that the strange alien world may only be around because a group of smaller planets collided into each other, according to a recent study in the journal Nature....
Originally posted on salon.com